The volcanic winter from the Tambora eruption of April 1815 ended the European summer of 1816. June in Switzerland was cold, dark, and continuously raining. The English tourist party at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva — Lord Byron (28), his physician Dr John Polidori (20), and their visitors Percy Bysshe Shelley (23), his unmarried partner Mary Godwin (18), and her stepsister Claire Clairmont (18, pregnant with Byron’s child) — were confined indoors for most of the week of 15-22 June.

They read German ghost stories from Johann Karl August Musäus’s Fantasmagoriana. On the evening of 16 June Byron proposed that each member of the party write a ghost story.

What each of them wrote

Byron began a fragment about a vampire-like undead nobleman and abandoned it within days. Percy Shelley started a story based on his own childhood and gave up. Claire Clairmont produced nothing. Polidori took Byron’s abandoned vampire fragment, rewrote it from a different angle, and produced over the subsequent weeks The Vampyre — the first modern vampire story in English, published in The New Monthly Magazine in April 1819 under Byron’s name (without permission; Polidori spent the rest of his life trying to recover credit).

The Vampyre — the aristocratic seducer Lord Ruthven, drawn closely from Byron — became the template for every subsequent fictional vampire from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla through Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the present.

Mary Godwin began writing more slowly. She had a vision a few nights after Byron’s proposal, while half-asleep, of “a pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” She wrote the opening of what would become Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus — the first novel in which a scientific procedure rather than a supernatural agency produces the impossible. It was published anonymously in January 1818. Mary’s name appeared on the second edition in 1823.

What the science was

Mary Godwin’s scientific reading in 1816 was specific and recent. Luigi Galvani’s 1791 experiments on electrical stimulation of frog muscle had been popularised across Europe; his nephew Giovanni Aldini had publicly demonstrated electrical stimulation of human corpses in London (1803), Bologna, and Vienna. The Newgate executed murderer George Forster had twitched and opened one eye during Aldini’s January 1803 demonstration. The crowd had been told the body might revive.

Galvanism — the use of electricity to provoke organic movement in dead tissue — was not yet medicine but was already a public spectacle. Mary Godwin had read about it; her father William Godwin’s library held the relevant texts. Percy Shelley had taken galvanic apparatus to Oxford as an undergraduate.

The Creature is not magical. He is the explicit product of an early 19th-century scientific procedure that the contemporary reader would have recognised. Mary Shelley’s innovation is using known experimental science as the engine of a fantastic narrative.

What happened to all five

Polidori killed himself with prussic acid in London in August 1821, aged 25, after a gambling debt he could not pay.

Percy Shelley drowned off Viareggio in July 1822, aged 29. Edward Trelawny burnt his body on a Tuscan beach.

Byron died of fever at Missolonghi in Greece in April 1824, aged 36.

Mary Shelley raised her only surviving child Percy Florence Shelley alone in London. She wrote five more novels — including The Last Man (1826), a pandemic-apocalypse novel set in the late 21st century. She died of a brain tumour in February 1851, aged 53.

Claire Clairmont was the last of the five to die — in Florence on 19 March 1879, aged 80. The Byron-Clairmont daughter Allegra had died of typhus at five years old in 1822 in a convent where Byron had sent her over Claire’s objection.

Two of the five had invented two literary genres in one week. Three of the five were dead within ten years.